(...) the representatives were intent on hammering certain points home: that the bill respects privacy and civil liberties, is not about surveillance, is targeted at actions by foreign states, and is nothing like SOPA.

Pro-CISPA factions' intent to head off another SOPA-style protest crystallized when I attended and livetweeted the small CISPA Town Hall Meeting with House Intelligence last week here in San Francisco (arranged by Hackers and Founders).

CISPA's people seem to have learned from SOPA that trying to ram an internet bill down our throats didn't work out so well last time.

So this time they were open to hearing our concerns.

Okay, not really. But here's how they pretended to listen to our serious concerns when we got two pro-CISPA reps from Washington face-to-face last week.

A pro-CISPA senior U.S. House of Representatives aide and pro-CISPA senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee Jamil Jaffer appeared via Google Hangout at the last-minute Town Hall.

Above all, they insisted that "no one" wants to stop this bill - at a time when there were 3/4 million signatures on the Stop CISPA petition.

The pro-CISPA reps demonstrated repeatedly that not only were they there for lip service and misdirection, they actually had no technical knowledge of what they were talking about.

The EFF's Dan Auerbaugh concluded afterward that "Congress just doesn't know enough to meddle intelligently with technology. The audience questions demonstrated this point quite sharply (...)"

SOPA protest lesson #3: make SOPA critics look like allies

Attempting to influence tech media into un-SOPA-ing CISPA is one way to get critics in your pocket. Tech press and bloggers are one major arena that the wider public looked to during SOPA for calls to action and guidance.

Another arena that got SOPA launched into consciousness and gave the protest firm footing was when major technology companies and website "utilities" like Wikipedia joined the anti-SOPA choir.

As we know, CISPA came out strong from the start with 28 large tech companies backing it: complete with letters of support from anti-SOPA corporations such as Facebook.

When it looked like CISPA was faltering, its author Rep. Mike Rogers made sure to alert the press that previously anti-SOPA Google (a company whose lack of support letter was getting anti-CISPA traction) not only completely supports CISPA, but that Google helped with the authoring of the bill.